Content II
The unit I am preparing for is targeting my Kindergarten students. Having poetry presented at a young age would benefit my students by allowing them to build trust in themselves and gain strength to express their thoughts and feelings. This will enable them to become aware of their self-identity. Having to identify elements in a picture will allow my students to learn and use new vocabulary. They will begin to appreciate the expressions in English coming from their peers, becoming comfortable enough to share their own thoughts without fear of bullying. Because of their short attention span there would be a few mini lessons to get through over the span of 4 to 6 weeks. The lessons in the unit would have to be brought into the classroom because our school is located in a rural area of the Navajo Reservation. Technology plays a huge factor in my lesson. Having a smart board which connects to the internet would be the ideal way to bring the pictures into the classroom. I would also use a Grammar Wall for better understanding of sentence structures. As I have said, my classroom is equipped with a Smart Screen TV so I will be able to pull up the poems and the images for the students to view as a group.
The Navajo (Dine) Tribe value their livestock so I would feature animals they consider to have significant value. These animals are sheep, horses, cattle, and birds. The sheep, for instance, are valued at the top of the list. The Navajo interact with this animal in their everyday lives. Chores for young Navajo children include feeding, watering and herding them. I have heard many elders state that the young lambs and kids grow with their children so the bond is ever lasting. Growing up in this environment challenges the child to become responsible and become aware of their surroundings. Their thought process is then tuned to function in a holistic manner. The Navajo use the meat of the sheep and goats to feed family members during gatherings which include traditional ceremonies big and small. The meat is the feature that pulls them together.
There are other uses for the sheep, the wool is also used to make the traditional clothing and for weaving rugs. Once the wool is sheared it goes through a process that includes cleaning, stripping, rolling and, if needed, dyeing. This last, most fastidious task takes several days and a tremendous amount of patience which results in the fine lines of the Navajo Rug Weaving projects. For this reason I have chosen Baa, Baa, Black Sheep from Mother Goose. Visually my students will see the black sheep and realize that they also have sheep to shear for income, as little as it may be nowadays but still a task that needs to be done. As we go through the poem discovering the sentences vocabulary words will accumulate. For instance, master and dame are both words my students may not have heard before. Also needing to be explained is the word lane because my student’s family groups do not live close enough together to have roads or streets. There usually is one dirt road, a bus route, which family households branch off, and which leads up to a group of houses clustered together. Not having black wool readily available I would have the students simply color white cotton balls to use in their art work. As an end project my students would produce a small 3-D picture they could refer back to when they retell the poem.
The next poem I would introduce to my students is Little Bo-Peep. When Little Bo-peep loses her sheep, the poem will affect my students powerfully because it is a misfortune all Navajo children have experienced once or twice in their lives, no matter if they are just visiting the family sheep camp or actually living on the farm. The Navajo students know that they would be in terrible trouble and would go out to look for the flock on their own. However, the poem, especially its illustration in some editions, suggests that young ladies should not wonder off on their own because of all the danger lurking. The best thing to do is go home and wait for them to come home on their own, which domesticated animals do. Little Bo-Peep is wandering into the wilderness, clearly a place where she should not be.
Another poem I have in mind is Mary Had a Little Lamb. Of course the most difficult part of discussing this poem it to break the habit of singing it without thinking about it. This poem would appeal to my students at a more personal level. Tending to lambs and kids usually starts when a Navajo Child able to walk without assistance. The child would be given a lamb or a kid to help the child show compassion and responsibility, just like a getting a puppy or kitten. When children own up to their accountability they grow a special bond which enforces their traditional values. In my opinion, my students would find the poem rather humorous because they would have had the same idea of bringing their lamb or kid to school. The picture they draw might show an old school house with an open field, no busses, no wire fences, and small classes.
An additional poem I would use in my classroom is Little Boy Blue. I feel my students could compare and contrast the words with their own experiences. The poem talks about the life of a farmer and some of the responsibilities children have while raised on a farm. Some of these chores are usually assigned to older children; however the younger siblings would be told to “help” or in other words watch and learn. Having siblings tag along usually leads to playing under a shaded area or along a dirt trail. The compare and contrast part would be on the falling asleep and losing track of time playing. One illustration shows a little boy slumped over fast asleep and the other people looking out onto the fields. The flock is in the center background and the farmhouse behind close to the haystack fields.
To end on a fanciful note, Hey, diddle, diddle would be the last poem I would discuss with my students. Now up to now the focus was on the animal in the poems. In this poem, the characters, still animals, participate in some amazing events. The Navajo also have some short stories where animals are unlike themselves and do things that human do. These are traditional stories about the Coyote and are shared with family members during the winter months. They are passed down from generation to generation orally and usually at night in a dimly lit room. The lighting creates a small circle so the storyteller and listeners enter a bubble. The darkness around them permits the subconscious to provide images as the storyteller unfolds the magical feats of the Coyote. In these Coyote Stories the animals tend to remind the reader of certain family members or community members whom they interact with because of the characteristics the Coyote portrays. As these stories are told, the listener hears the situations the Coyote gets himself into and how he wriggles through to show the moral of the story.
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